Hey everyone, I just wanted to introduce myself, and give you all an update on the spam video submissions.
I recently joined the Dot Org team at Automattic, and part of my role is to help maintain WordPress.tv. One of my first projects was to look at solutions to the spam problem.
I added a simple honeypot to the submit form about a month ago to try and catch bots, but it hasn’t been very successful. It looks like most of the spam that’s being submitted is being done manually by actual people, which makes it much harder to catch programmatically.
So, I’ll be working on a more robust approach over the next few weeks that will hopefully cut down on it, but it’s likely that we’ll always have to deal with a certain amount.
I’d also like to suggest a couple tweaks to the review process that I think would be helpful with regards to these submissions:
- Instead of using the “spam” tag for these posts, the “public-spam” one would be better. There are some legitimate videos related to (combatting) spam that already use the “spam” tag, so using a different tag will help keep those separated from the spam submissions.
- Moving the posts to Trash Trash in WordPress is like the Recycle Bin on your PC or Trash in your Macintosh computer. Users with the proper permission level (administrators and editors) have the ability to delete a post, page, and/or comments. When you delete the item, it is moved to the trash folder where it will remain for 30 days. (but not permanently deleting them), would make it obvious that it’s already been reviewed and would prevent them from cluttering up the legitimate pending posts.
I’ve got through and done those two things for all the existing posts.
I’ll also post another update once the next solution is in place.
#spam
